God. God’s name, God’s kingdom and God’s will are all in it. Without
prayer His name is profaned, His kingdom fails, and His will is decried
and opposed. God’s will can be done on earth as it is done in Heaven.
God’s will done on earth makes earth like Heaven. Importunate praying is
the mighty energy which establishes God’s will on earth as it is
established in Heaven.
He is still teaching us that prayer sanctifies and makes hopeful and
sweet our daily toil for daily bread. Forgiveness of sins is to be
sought by prayer, and the great prayer plea we are to make for
forgiveness is that we have forgiven all those who have sinned against
us. It involves love for our enemies so far as to pray for them, to
bless them and not curse them, and to pardon their offences against us
whatever those offences may be.
We are to pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” that is, that while we
thus pray, the tempter and the temptation are to be watched against,
resisted and prayed against.
All these things He had laid down in this law of prayer, but many a
simple lesson of comment, expansion, and expression He adds to His
statute law.
In this prayer He teaches His disciples, so familiar to thousands in
this day who learned it at their mother’s knees in childhood, the words
are so childlike that children find their instruction, edification and
comfort in them as they kneel and pray. The most glowing mystic and the
most careful thinker finds each his own language in these simple words
of prayer. Beautiful and revered as these words are, they are our words
for solace, help and learning.
He led the way in prayer that we might follow His footsteps. Matchless
leader in matchless praying! Lord, teach us to pray as Thou didst
Thyself pray!
How marked the contrast between the Sacerdotal Prayer and this “Lord’s
Prayer,” this copy for praying He gave to His disciples as the first
elements of prayer. How simple and childlike! No one has ever approached
in composition a prayer so simple in its petitions and yet so
comprehensive in all of its requests.
How these simple elements of prayer as given by our Lord commend
themselves to us! This prayer is for us as well as for those to whom it
was first given. It is for the child in the A B C of prayer, and it is
for the graduate of the highest institutions of learning. It is a
personal prayer, reaching to all our needs and covering all our sins. It
is the highest form of prayer for others. As the scholar can never in
all his after studies or learning dispense with his A B C, and as the
alphabet gives form, colour and expression to all after learning,
impregnating all and grounding all, so the learner in Christ can never
dispense with the Lord’s Prayer. But he may make it form the basis of
his higher praying, this intercession for others in the Sacerdotal
Prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer is ours by our mother’s knee and fits us in all the
stages of a joyous Christian life. The Sacerdotal Prayer is ours also in
the stages and office of our royal priesthood as intercessors before
God. Here we have oneness with God, deep spiritual unity, and unswerving
loyalty to God, living and praying to glorify God.
XI
OUR LORD’S SACERDOTAL PRAYER
_Jesus closes His life with inimitable calmness, confidence and
sublimity. “I have glorified Thee; I have finished the work which
Thou gavest me to do.” The annals of earth have nothing comparable
to it in real serenity and sublimity. May we come to our end thus,
in supreme loyalty to Christ._
—EDWARD BOUNDS.
We come now to consider our Lord’s Sacerdotal Prayer, as found recorded
in the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel.
Obedience to the Father and abiding in the Father, these belong to the
Son, and these belong to us, as partners with Christ in His Divine work
of intercession. How tenderly and with what pathos and how absorbingly
He prays for His disciples! “I pray for them; I pray not for the world.”
What a pattern of prayerfulness for God’s people! For God’s people are
God’s cause, God’s Church and God’s Kingdom. Pray for God’s people, for
their unity, their sanctification, and their glorification. How the
subject of their unity pressed upon Him! These walls of separation,
these alienations, these riven circles of God’s family, and these
warring tribes of ecclesiastics—how He is torn and bleeds and suffers
afresh at the sight of these divisions! Unity—that is the great burden
of that remarkable Sacerdotal Prayer. “That they may be one, even as we
are one.” The spiritual oneness of God’s people—that is the heritage of
God’s glory to them, transmitted by Christ to His Church.
First of all, in this prayer, Jesus prays for Himself, not now the
suppliant as in Gethsemane, not weakness, but strength now. There is not
now the pressure of darkness and of hell, but passing for the time over
the fearful interim, He asks that He may be glorified, and that His
exalted glory may secure glory to His Father. His sublime loyalty and
fidelity to God are declared, that fidelity to God which is of the very
essence of interceding prayer. Our devoted lives pray. Our unswerving
loyalty to God are eloquent pleas to Him, and give access and confidence
in our advocacy. This prayer is gemmed, but its walls are adamant. What
profound and granite truths! What fathomless mysteries! What deep and
rich experiences do such statements as these involve:
“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true
God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.
“And all mine are thine, and thine are mine, and I am glorified in
them.
“And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it, that
the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.
“And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the
glory which I had with thee before the world was.”
Let us stop and ask, have we eternal life? Do we know God
experimentally, consciously, and do we know Him really and personally?
Do we know Jesus Christ as a person, and as a personal Saviour? Do we
know Him by a heart acquaintance, and know Him well? This, this only, is
eternal life. And is Jesus glorified in us? Let us continue this
personal inquiry. Do our lives prove His divinity? And does Jesus shine
brighter because of us? Are we opaque or transparent bodies, and do we
darken or reflect His pure light? Once more let us ask: Do we seek God’s
glory? Do we seek glory where Christ sought it? “Glorify thou me with
thy own self.” Do we esteem the presence and the possession of God our
most excellent glory and our supreme good?
How closely does He bind Himself and His Father to His people! His heart
centers upon them in this high hour of holy communion with His Father.
“I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of
the world; thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have
kept thy word.
“Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me
are of thee.
“For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they
have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee,
and they have believed that thou didst send me.
“I pray for them; I pray not for the world; but for them which thou
hast given me; for they are thine.
“And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in
them.”
He prays also for keeping for these disciples. Not only were they to be
chosen, elected and possessed, but were to be kept by the Father’s
watchful eyes and by the Father’s omnipotent hand. “And now I am no more
in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy
Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that
they may be one, as we are.”
He prays that they might be kept by the Holy Father, in all holiness by
the power of His Name. He asks that His people may be kept from sin,
from all sin, from sin in the concrete and sin in the abstract, from sin
in all its shapes of evil, from all sin in this world. He prays that
they might not only be fit and ready for Heaven, but ready and fit for
earth, for its sweetest privileges, its sternest duties, its deepest
sorrows, and its richest joys; ready for all of its trials, consolations
and triumphs. “I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the
world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.”
He prays that they may be kept from the world’s greatest evil, which is
sin. He desires that they may be kept from the guilt, the power, the
pollution and the punishment of sin. The Revised Version makes it read,
“That thou shouldst keep them from the evil one.” Kept from the devil,
so that he might not touch them, nor find them, nor have a place in
them; that they might be all owned, possessed, filled and guarded by
God. “Kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.”
He places us in the arms of His Father, on the bosom of His Father, and
in the heart of His Father. He calls God into service, puts Him to the
front, and places us under His Father’s closer keeping, under His
Father’s shadow, and under the covert of His Father’s wing. The Father’s
rod and staff are for our security, for our comfort, for our refuge, for
our strength and guidance.
These disciples were not to be taken out of the world, but kept from its
evil, its monster evil, which is itself. “This present evil world.” How
the world seduces, dazzles, and deludes the children of men! His
disciples are chosen out of the world, out of the world’s bustle and
earthliness, out of its all-devouring greed of gain, out of its
money-desire, money-love, and money-toil. Earth draws and holds as if it
was made out of gold and not out of dirt; as though it was covered with
diamonds and not with graves.
“They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” Not only
from sin and Satan were they to be kept, but also from the soil, stain
and the taint of worldliness, as Christ was free from it. Their relation
to Christ was not only to free them from the world’s defiling taint, its
unhallowed love, and its criminal friendships, but the world’s hatred
would inevitably follow their Christ-likeness. No result so necessarily
and universally follows its cause as this. “The world hath hated them
because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”
How solemn and almost awful the repetition of the declaration, “They are
not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” How pronounced,
radical and eternal was our Lord Christ’s divorce from the world! How
pronounced, radical and eternal is that of our Lord’s true followers
from the world! The world hates the disciple as it hated his Lord, and
will crucify the disciple just as it crucified his Lord. How pertinent
the question, have we the Christ unworldliness? Does the world hate us
as it hated our Lord? Are His words fulfilled in us?
“If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated
you.
“If ye were of the world, the world would love his own; but because
ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world,
therefore the world hateth you.”
He puts Himself before us clear cut as the full portraiture of an
unworldly Christian. Here is our changeless pattern. “They are not of
the world even as I am not of the world.” We must be cut after this
pattern.
The subject of their unity pressed upon Him. Note how He called His
Father’s attention to it, and see how He pleaded for this unity of His
followers: “And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the
world and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those
whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are.”
Again He returns to it as He sees the great crowds flocking to His
standard as the ages pass on:
“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in
thee, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe
that thou hast sent me.
“And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may
be one, even as we are one.
“I in them and thou in me that they may be made perfect in one; and
that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them,
as thou hast loved me.”
Notice how intently His heart was set on this unity. What shameful
history, and what bloody annals has this lack of unity written for God’s
Church! These walls of separations, these alienations, these riven
circles of God’s family, these warring tribes of men, and these
internecine fratricidal wars! He looks ahead and sees how Christ is
torn, how He bleeds and suffers afresh in all these sad things of the
future. The unity of God’s people was to be the heritage of God’s glory
promised to them. Division and strife are the devil’s bequest to the
Church, a heritage of failure, weakness, shame and woe.
The oneness of God’s people was to be the one credential to the world of
the divinity of Christ’s mission on earth. Let us ask in all candor, are
we praying for this unity as Christ prayed for it? Are we seeking the
peace, the welfare, the glory, the might and the divinity of God’s cause
as it is found in the unity of God’s people?
Going back again, note, please, how He puts Himself as the exponent and
the pattern of this unworldliness which He prays may possess His
disciples. He sends them into the world just as His Father sent Him into
the world. He expects them to be and do, just as He was and as He did
for His Father. He sought the sanctification of His disciples that they
might be wholly devoted to God and purified from all sin. He desired in
them a holy life and a holy work for God. He devoted Himself to death in
order that they might be devoted in life to God. For a true
sanctification He prayed, a real, whole, and thorough sanctification,
embracing soul, body and mind, for time and eternity. With Him the word
itself had much to do with their true sanctification. “Sanctify them
through thy truth; thy word is truth. And for their sakes I sanctify
myself, that they also might be sanctified by the truth.”
Entire devotedness was to be the type of their sanctification. His
prayer for their sanctification marks the pathway to full
sanctification. Prayer is that pathway. All the ascending steps to that
lofty position of entire sanctification are steps of prayer, increasing
prayerfulness in spirit and increasing prayerfulness in fact. “Pray
without ceasing” is the imperative prelude to “the very God of peace
sanctify you wholly.” And prayer is but the continued interlude and
doxology of this rich grace in the heart: “I pray God your whole spirit
and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.”
We can only meet our full responsibilities and fulfill our high mission
when we go forth sanctified as Christ our Lord was sanctified. He sends
us into the world just as His Father sent Him into the world. He expects
us to be as He was, to do as He did, and to glorify the Father just as
He glorified the Father.
What longings He had to have us with Him in Heaven: “Father, I will that
they also whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may
behold my glory, which thou hast given me.” What response do our truant
hearts make to this earnest, loving, Christly longing? Are we as eager
for Heaven as He is to have us there? How calm, how majestic and how
authoritative is His “I will”!
He closes His life with inimitable calmness, confidence and sublimity.
“I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou
gavest me to do.”
The annals of earth have nothing comparable to it in real serenity and
sublimity. May we come to our end thus in supreme loyalty to Christ.
XII
THE GETHSEMANE PRAYER
_The cup! the cup! the cup! Our Lord did not use many words: but He
used His few words again and again, till this cup! and Thy will!—Thy
will be done, and this cup—was all His prayer. “The cup! The cup!
The cup!” cried Christ: first on His feet: and then on His knees:
and then on His face.... “Lord, teach us to pray!”_—ALEXANDER WHYTE,
D.D.
We come to Gethsemane. What a contrast! The sacerdotal prayer had been
one of intense feelings of universal grasp, and of world-wide and
illimitable sympathy and solicitude for His church. Perfect calmness and
perfect poise reigned. Majestic He was and simple and free from passion
or disquiet. The Royal Intercessor and Advocate for others, His
petitions are like princely edicts, judicial and authoritative. How
changed now! In Gethsemane He seems to have entered another region, and
becomes another man. His sacerdotal prayer, so exquisite in its tranquil
flow, so unruffled in its strong, deep current, is like the sun, moving
in meridian, unsullied glory, brightening, vitalising, ennobling and
blessing everything. The Gethsemane prayer is that same sun declining in
the west, plunged into an ocean of storm and cloud, storm-covered,
storm-eclipsed with gloom, darkness and terror on every side.
The prayer in Gethsemane is exceptional in every way. The
super-incumbent load of the world’s sin is upon Him. The lowest point of
His depression has been reached. The bitterest cup of all, His bitter
cup, is being pressed to His lips. The weakness of all His weaknesses,
the sorrow of all His sorrows, the agony of all His agonies are now upon
Him. The flesh is giving out with its fainting and trembling pulsations,
like the trickling of His heart’s blood. His enemies have thus far
triumphed. Hell is in a jubilee and bad men are joining in the hellish
carnival.
Gethsemane was Satan’s hour, Satan’s power, and Satan’s darkness. It was
the hour of massing all of Satan’s forces for a final, last conflict.
Jesus had said, “The prince of this world cometh and findeth nothing in
me.” The conflict for earth’s mastery is before Him. The spirit led and
drove Him into the stern conflict and severe temptation of the
wilderness. But His Comforter, His Leader and His inspiration through
His matchless history, seems to have left Him now. “He began to be
sorrowful and very heavy,” and we hear Him under this great pressure
exclaiming, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.” The
depression, conflict and agony had gone to the very core of His spirit,
and had sunk Him to the very verge of death. “Sore amazed” He was.
Surprise and awe depress His soul. “Very heavy” was the hour of hell’s
midnight which fell upon His spirit. Very heavy was this hour when all
the sins of all the world, of every man, of all men, fell upon His
immaculate soul, with all their stain and all their guilt.
He cannot abide the presence of His chosen friends. They cannot enter
into the depths and demands of this fearful hour. His trusted and set
watchers were asleep. His Father’s face is hid. His Father’s approving
voice is silent. The Holy Spirit, who had been with Him in all the
trying hours of His life, seems to have withdrawn from the scene. Alone
He must drink the cup, alone He must tread the winepress of God’s fierce
wrath and of Satan’s power and darkness, and of man’s envy, cruelty and
vindictiveness. The scene is well described by Luke:
“And he came out and went, as he was wont, to the Mount of Olives:
and his disciples also followed him.
“And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that ye enter
not into temptation.
“And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled
down and prayed.
“Saying, Father, if thou be willing remove this cup from me;
nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.
“And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening
him.
“And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was
as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
“And when he rose up from prayer, and was come to his disciples, he
found them sleeping for sorrow.
“And said unto them, Why sleep ye? Rise and pray, lest ye enter into
temptation.”
The prayer agony of Gethsemane crowns Calvary with glory and while the
prayers offered by Christ on the cross are the union of weakness and
strength, of deepest agony and desolation, accompanied with sweetest
calm, divinest submission and implicit confidence.
Nowhere in prophet or priest, king or ruler, of synagogue or church,
does the ministry of prayer assume such marvels of variety, power and
fragrance as in the life of Jesus Christ. It is the aroma of God’s
sweetest spices, aflame with God’s glory, and consumed by God’s will.
We find in this Gethsemane prayer that which we find nowhere else in the
praying of Christ. “O, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass
from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” This is
different from the whole tenor and trend of His praying and doing. How
different from His sacerdotal prayer! “Father, I will,” is the law and
life of that prayer. In His last directions for prayer, He makes our
will the measure and condition of prayer. “If ye abide in me, and my
words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto
you.” He said to the Syro-phœnician woman, “Great is thy faith! Be it
unto thee as thou wilt.”
But in Gethsemane His praying was against the declared will of God. The
pressure was so heavy upon Him, the cup was so bitter, the burden was so
strange and intolerable, that the flesh cried out for relief. Prostrate,
sinking, sorrowful unto death. He sought to be relieved from that which
seemed too heavy to bear. He prayed, however, not in revolt against
God’s will, but in submission to that will, and yet to change God’s plan
and to alter God’s purposes. He prayed. Pressed by the weakness of the
flesh, and by the powers of hell in all their dire, hellish malignity
and might, Jesus was on this one only occasion constrained to pray
against the will of God. He did it, though, with great wariness and
pious caution. He did it with declared and inviolable submission to
God’s will. But this was exceptional.
Simple submission to God’s will is not the highest attitude of the soul
to God. Submission may be seeming, induced by conditions, nothing but an
enforced surrender, not cheerful but grudging, only a temporary
expedient, a fitful resolve. When the occasion or calamity which called
it forth is removed, the will returns to its old ways and to its old
self.
Jesus Christ prayed always with this one exception in conformity with
the will of God. He was one with God’s plan, and one with God’s will. To
pray in conformity with God’s will was the life and law of Christ. The
same was law of His praying. Conformity, to live one with God, is a far
higher and diviner life than to live simply in submission to God. To
pray in conformity—together with God—is a far higher and diviner way to
pray than mere submission. At its best state, submission is
non-rebellion, an acquiescence, which is good, but not the highest. The
most powerful form of praying is positive, aggressive, mightily outgoing
and creative. It molds things, changes things and brings things to pass.
Conformity means to “stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.”
It means to delight to do God’s will, to run with eagerness and ardour
to carry out His plans. Conformity to God’s will involves submission,
patient, loving, sweet submission. But submission in itself falls short
of and does not include conformity. We may be submissive but not
conformed. We may accept results against which we have warred, and even
be resigned to them.
Conformity means to be one with God, both in result and in processes.
Submission may be one with God in the end. Conformity is one with God in
the beginning, and the end. Jesus had conformity, absolute and perfect,
to God’s will, and by that He prayed. This was the single point where
there was a drawing back from God’s processes, extorted by insupportable
pain, fear and weariness. His submission was abject, loyal and
confiding, as His conformity had been constant and perfect. Conformity
is the only true submission, the most loyal, the sweetest and the
fullest.
Gethsemane has its lessons of humble supplications as Jesus knelt alone
in the garden. Of burdened prostration, as He fell on His face, of
intense agony, of distressing dread, of hesitancy and shrinking back, of
crying out for relief—yet amid it all of cordial submission to God,
accompanied with a singleness of purpose for His glory.
Satan will have for each of us his hour and power of darkness and for
each of us the bitter cup and the fearful spirit of gloom.